Featuring the best of AIIM 2012 held in San Francisco this March; our virtual conference lets you take in sessions you wanted to see but may have missed. Plus, if you weren’t one of the fortunate few to attend AIIM 2012 in person; this online conference gives you a chance to catch up on what you missed. To get you ready for June 7, here are four of the sessions from AIIM 2012. Scroll down and you’ll discover a dissection of the “cloud,” different methods of collaboration, how to manage dynamic content, and how to maximize the use of SharePoint to enable collaboration.

Be sure to register today: The Best of AIIM Conference 2012 – The Virtual Event.

The Cloud: Powering Social, Local, Mobile. An AIIM 2012 Session by Chris Riley

You hear "the cloud" everywhere -- radio and TV commercials, technology and business magazines and websites, conversations with your boss and users to "just put it in the cloud," etc. But what IS the cloud? We'll set the baseline and dissect what the cloud is; it's various components; and how those components interact with this new way of business. The Cloud can be broken into four facets: - Software as a service - Infrastructure as a service - Development/test hosting - Cloud-based file systems Each of these facets aligns with social, local, and mobile -- and content management -- in different ways.

2 Types of Collaboration. An AIIM 2012 Session by Billy Cripe

Collaboration comes in many forms and influences how we work. But accidental collaboration is a new phenomenon that has emerged with collaborative and social software. In this presentation, Billy covers the two types of collaboration -- intentional and accidental -- and explores how accidental collaboration, powered by the social technology revolution, is vastly more powerful than other kinds of collaboration. He explores the 10 key requirements for successfully orchestrating accidental collaboration.

Managing Dynamically Changing Content. An AIIM 2012 Session by Linda Larrivee

In November 2011, Ultimate Software was the recipient of a Forrester Groundswell Award for the effectiveness of its social customer community, showing that you can achieve innovation in social technology applications while still achieving key business and organization goals. As a SaaS provider of People Management solutions, it's vital that Ultimate respond quickly to the latest changes from taxing authorities and regulatory agencies, providing timely and accurate communications to customers. Managing related content in a way that enables rapid and dynamic communication is only possible through the application of well-organized structure and controls including single-source authoring. This session looks at how Ultimate Software's Content and Communications team is continuously improving upon how to collect, create and manage information used to support a dynamic customer communications environment.

Maximizing Your SharePoint Investment- Social, Sharing, and Search. AIIM 2012 Session by Bert Sandie

Bert Sandie talks about how EA uses technology to enable company-wide collaboration. Many companies who are using SharePoint are looking at how they can best maximize their investment. This talk will examine the social, sharing, and search features provided by SharePoint 2010. We will take a deep dive at how you can customize what comes out-of-the-box to create a customized solution that meets your company's business needs and embraces your culture. Specifically, we will examine use cases for social profiles, video usage, articles with rich media, activity streams, and how to find all of this information using enterprise search. We will show real-world examples of companies who are gaining significant benefits to their business, employee engagement, and culture by creating thoughtful and innovative SharePoint solutions that meet their employees' needs.

I worry because I’ve been around this business long enough to remember multiple times when the focus shifted to rapid development instead of custom development, and every time that happened, solution quality suffered. At the dawn of the PC era, I worked for a guy who said “Everything is VisiCalc!” We laughed, but I’m sure that if you peak around your office, you will see numerous “systems” deployed in a spreadsheet that deserve a better solution. In fact, I would argue that some of the simplest efforts to make “development” faster have often produced results that are not as good as what we deserve. The simplest thing I can think of is a template. Templates can be a great starting point, but whether it’s a Word document that gets sent or stored with unused fields, a Team Site in SharePoint with a perpetually empty calendar, or a PowerPoint presentation with an awkward two-line title; templates often don’t move from that starting point.

If your job is to develop SharePoint solutions, then you need to sit with the people who will use that solution and find out what they need to do. If you want to start with an example, that’s fine, but if you find yourself starting sentences with “you should be able to…” stop! When you drop a “standard” part on a new page, explain the functionality to the person who will work with it. If they say something like “oh, we don’t use…” or “we’re not required to…” or “do you know how we actually do…?” that’s your signal to edit the part. It might be nice to have every department using the same widget, but not if everyone is forced to deal with 2-3 metadata columns they will never use or have to wade through three or five steps that really don’t help them get to the end-point they have in mind. If you want to save time during development, employ standard methods, use libraries of standard functions, develop your own library of scripts so that your toolbox has the tools you can trust. By all means, build yourself some templates, but use them as a starting point, not an answer.

Bob: Hello, I want to thank you for allowing me to interview you and for the record, can you provide my readers with some insight as to who you work for and with a description of your role?

John: I'm currently a first line manager at Fujitsu Enterprise Business Services. I manage a large team (25+) of senior DBAs and application engineers who support all the relational databases for Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, as well as the team that supports BCBSNC's major document, content and imaging systems like Mobius, Filenet and Thunderhead.

Bob: When did you get the idea to make AIIM Education part of your training focus and what were the drivers for the decision?

John: I've relied on AIIM information, white-papers, etc. for a long time in the content management space. As my involvement in enterprise content management increased, both in terms of setting strategy, defining policies, and executing operationally, I wanted to take the next step and get some quality formal training. AIIM was my first choice.

Bob: What do you see as a benefit for you and future attendees of these programs?

John: Well, program curriculum is great but the benefits extend far beyond the classroom. Whether in class or as an AIIM member you get to be a part of a large network of folks who are not just thinking about but doing and going through the same things you are, and that's immensely valuable.

Bob: For the future, how do you see the role of AIIM education evolving in relation to you and/or your customers?

John: From e-discovery to social media, I think AIIM's done a great job of keeping up with changes in the marketplace.  I also appreciate the technology-agnostic approach. Whether it's imaging, content management, or social media, AIIM gets that success is never about the tool or the brand, but the deliberate and thoughtful approach you take in how you establish a program that values and accounts for people and process.

Bob: Is there anything else you might want to share with our readers related to AIIM Training and how it has been of benefit to you and may be of benefit to them?

John: I think I'd like to see more un-conferences, un-meetups, tweetups, etc., greater use of social media, and would like to see AIIM grow its community.  There's a lot of expertise out there, let's look for different ways to share that.

Bob: I want to thank you, for taking time to talk with me and for sharing your valuable insights and perspectives with our readers.

What say you? Do you have a story to tell? What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you have a topic of interest you would like discussed in this forum? Let me know.

Bob Larrivee, Director and Industry Advisor – AIIM

Email me: blarrivee@aiim.org   

Follow me on Twitter – BobLarrivee

www.aiim.org/training     

The irony is that we do plenty of homework before buying a microwave oven that costs a whole lot less than any ECM, BPM, or other content solution I’ve ever heard of. So why on earth don't we apply the same discipline to the acquisition of information technology?

The answer is that conducting the necessary research is hard. It requires gathering information from everywhere within the organization that the new system is intended to touch, and analyzing it to identify the core functionality that is required. Crossing departmental boundaries in this way can elicit slow and less-than-constructive responses as managers reflexively defend against what they see as encroachment upon their turf. Resentment then can build in both directions as the researcher tires of the runaround and the “researchees” grow weary of the questioning. After a point, who would want to put up with all this?

You would. Or at least, you should.

Nobody is saying this diligence is fun to conduct, but it is central to ensuring you receive maximum total value from what you eventually acquire. Buying a microwave that turns out not to have the features you wanted most is annoying, but it isn't especially critical – not in the least because you will probably be up to a new one in a matter of only a few years. Your information system, however, likely will be counted on to operate for a decade or more, so it's important to get it right since you will have to live with – and invest in – its shortcomings for a long time to come.

So please: do here what you do in the kitchen, where there's so much less at stake.